The six pillars of customer experience was developed to showcase businesses the kind of emotional outcome which is closely linked to delivering an exceptional customer experience. The pillars are connected and when combined can help business to understand how well is their customer experience delivered across various channels and industries. Successful organizations have a grip on all these pillars and are constantly outstanding at all of them.
1. Integrity
Being trustworthy and engendering trust
Organizations that displays trustworthiness on a consistent basis are the foundation of integrity. Organizations and its staffs can create trust building moments and events which helps to increase integrity. From a customer point of view, organizations which can deliver on its promises are the key to integrity. Trust and integrity are found in a organization sense of purpose and how socially, morally, and ethically it discharges this purpose
2. Resolution
Turning a poor experience into a great one
It’s important to recover customers which has bad experience. No matter how good some procedures and processes are, things will go wrong. Top organizations have processes which can put customer back in the position they should have been as soon as possible. This heroic recovery, teaches us that is no longer good enough just to fix the problems, but also the customer has to feel good about the service recovery experience. Two of the successful resolution elements are a sincere apology and acting with urgency in correcting the wrongs.
3. Expectations
Meeting, Managing, and Exceeding Customer Expectations.
The best brands out there set high standards. So its normal for customers to have high expectations on how their needs can be satisfied based on the standards encountered. Top organizations know that their brand promise and interactions set expectations to customers which they must fulfill or even exceed in some cases.
4. Empathy
Understanding customers circumstances to establish relationship .
Understanding someone else’s (your customer) experience emotionally is strongly associated with empathy. Establishing a strong relationship with customers is possible with empathy creating behaviors. This allows businesses to show customers that they know how customers feel and then give solutions because of the understanding.
5. Personalization
Using individualized attention to drive emotional connection.
One of the most valuable component of experiences is personalization. Being able to show that you understand customers specific circumstances and adapting to the experience accordingly is a key part of personalization. Experience that feels personal can be created by knowing customers preferences, past interactions, creating individualized attention, and use of name.
Great personalization is making the customer feel more in control, valued, and important after their interaction with you.
6. Time & Effort
Minimizing customer efforts and creating friction-less processes
Customers are looking for instant gratifications due to the lack of time they have nowadays. Removing obstacles which delays customers decision making process and making them achieve their objectives easily is key to increase loyalty. Companies can use time as a competitive advantage since it can cut costs as long as other pillars are not sacrificed.
